1.

SALIM MANSUR

Background

Salim Mansur is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He is a former columnist for the London Free Press and the Toronto Sun, and has contributed to various publications including National Review, the Middle East Forum and Frontpagemag. He often presents analysis on the Muslim world, Islam, South Asia and the Middle East.

Salim Mansur is Associate Professor in the faculty of social sciences, University of Western Ontario, London, and teaches in the department of political science. He is the author of Delectable Lie: a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism (2011), Islam’s Predicament: Perspectives of a Dissident Muslim (2009) and co-editor of The Indira-Rajiv Years: the Indian Economy and Polity 1966-1991 (1994), and has published widely in academic journals such as Jerusalem Quarterly, The Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Middle East Quarterly.

Mansur wrote a weekly syndicated column for Toronto Sun for over a decade since before 9/11 and his Sun columns were published across Canada in newspapers owned by the Sun Media. He wrote a monthly column for the magazine Western Standard (Calgary), and periodically for National Post (Canada). He has published in the Globe and Mail (Toronto), in the Wall Street Journal, National Review Online and FrontPageMagazine.com, in the webmagazine PJMedia.com in the United States and in the Canadian Observer; he also writes for the on-line journal of the Gatestone Institute, New York.

Mansur was born in Calcutta, India, and moved to Canada where he completed his studies receiving a doctorate in political science from the University of Toronto. Before joining the University of Western Ontario he worked as a Research Fellow at the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security in Ottawa. Mansur is a Senior Distinguished Fellow with the Gatestone Institute in New York, member of the Board of Directors of Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, D.C., an academic consultant with the Center for Security Policy also based in Washington, D.C., Member of the Advisory Board for the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform in Ottawa, Vice President for the Council of Muslims Facing Tomorrow based in Toronto, and Vice President for Canadians Against Suicide-Bombing. He is a frequent analyst and commentator on radio and television, invited as a panelist in PBS Jim Lehrer Hour and participated in the Doha Debates held in Doha, Qatar, broadcast on the BBC World Forum from London, England. Mansur’s book Delectable Lie was awarded in 2014 the “Montaigne Medal” by the Eric Hoffer Book Award (USA) for the “most thought-provoking title” of the year. Mansur was presented in February 2015 with the POGG (Peace, Order, & Good Government) “Canadian Values Award” in Ottawa, and in September 2006 with the American Jewish Congress’s Stephen S. Wise “Profiles in Courage” award in Los Angeles, United States.

History is paradoxical. This is because it is riddled with unintended consequences that are unavoidable, as they are part of the warp-and-woof of history.

History is also paradoxical, it might be said, because the gods of history keep reminding us mortals that our conceit in being overly rational actors, foresighted and forearmed, is misplaced. Our best-laid plans are only as good as the limitation of our knowledge, which is finite in the face of infinitude. Only the gods of history know beginnings and ends ahead of time. Or as Shakespeare wrote, “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

But when we, in the sobriety of our minds, make some sense of history we do so in retrospect as spectators. As actors in history, we have flawed expectation of our motives and imperfect understanding of our roles. Hence, the unintended consequences of our actions that torment us are mostly of our own making.

Ahead of the July 18-21 Republican National Convention meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s presumptive nominee after winning the Indiana primary on May 3. The effort to stop Trump, however, persists with some party insiders and disgruntled conservatives insisting they will contest rules on the convention floor and strive to steal the nomination, or mount a third-party bid threatening party unity in a manner not seen since Republicans gathered in 1976 in Kansas City, Missouri, to nominate their candidate for that year’s election.

The head of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, has warned fellow Republicans that any third-party bid would be a “suicide mission” that could wreck the United States for generations to come. The choice for Americans voting in November to elect their president will be stark between Donald Trump and the likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the consequences of who gets elected as the 45th President of the United States will not be confined for Americans only, it will also be far reaching for the rest of the world.

The people of Britain made their decision by a slim majority of 52 per cent to 48 percent to Leave the EU. After months of heart-wrenching debates and all the leverage that the Remain side with the Prime Minister David Cameron and his opposite, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, could apply, the people decided staying within the EU was not positive for Britain’s future.

The referendum’s outcome throws Britain into a period of economic and political uncertainties that the Remain side vigorously pushed as their main argument for staying within the EU. There will be a lot of soul-searching among the British elites in politics and business, in the media and in the universities, as to why the opponents of the EU prevailed. The referendum results will be minutely analyzed to understand why the British public was not sufficiently persuaded by their party leaders to back the status quo, and why on the other hand a majority of voters put aside their fear of uncertainty in favor of leaving the EU.

But the overarching reason why Britain left the EU, I believe, is plainly and simply understood if political correctness is set aside. A slim majority of the British public, primarily its aging population who remember what Britain was once like not too long ago as society and culture that open immigration policy severely, if not mortally, has undermined, decided that to save what remained of their island kingdom they needed to regain their full political sovereignty instead of losing more of it to the bureaucrats of the EU in Brussels.